Quotations Offer Insight and Meaning from Others’ Experiences

I have always enjoyed pithy quotations. Perhaps the fascination derives from a love of language and thought at an early age.

Even by early adolescence, one of my favorite books came from a flea market find. I don’t recall the exact purchase, but I probably obtained the scrubby copy of Elbert Hubbard’s Scrap Book for no more than a dollar.

Inside the front of the book, its purpose is explained: “Elbert Hubbard's Scrap Book Containing the Inspired and Inspiring Selections Gathered During a Life Time of Discriminating Reading For His Own Use -- Printed and Made Into a Book by the American Book-Stratford Press at Their Shops in New York City -- The Roycrofters – 1923.”

Hubbard’s book is full of not only quotes, but poems and sketches as well. One of the short pieces I recall includes an excerpt from Mark Twain’s posthumously published Letters from the Earth. Embittered and sarcastic in his final years, Twain lets his wit shine through. In this text of a few paragraphs, he literally play’s devil’s advocate by arguing a case for Satan’s lack of acceptance among humankind. Some of the best quotations in the book—and in general—often come from Mark Twain.

I often remember or seek out quotations, which I use in the signature line of e-mails I send. Last week, a friend complimented me on my use of quotations and inquired about their source, prompting me to ponder my preoccupation with them. Others apparently share this fascination. In fact, my boss, the principal at the high school where I teach English, strolls into my classroom occasionally to share some of his favorite quotations which he has happened to find by searching the Internet, in order to share them with me, and I always enjoy hearing them.

I never get tired of seeking out the terse but meaning-filled ideas composed and shared by others. As British Romantic poet John Keats once wrote in a letter, “Let him on a certain day read a certain page of full Poesy or distilled Prose, and let him wander upon it, and bring home to it, and prophesy upon it, and dream upon it: until it becomes stale—But when will it do so? Never—When Man has arrived at a certain ripeness in intellect any one grand and spiritual passage serves him as a starting-post towards all 'the two-and-thirty Palaces.' How happy is such a voyage of concentration, what delicious diligent Indolence!”

The following are a few of my favorite quotes:

• "Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned." — Mark  Twain 
• "Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper." — Robert Frost 
• "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." — Alvin  Toffler 
• "Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life." — Henry Miller 
• "To be an artist means never to avert your eyes." — Kurosawa 
• “You begin saving the world by saving one person at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.” — Charles Bukowski 
• "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." — William Butler Yeats 
• "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." — Albert Einstein
• “The blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.” — Ralph Ellison 
• “I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it through not dying." — Woody Allen 

Of course, my favorite quotations change as I read more and encounter different ideas and knowledge. Every so often I glean new insights, and thus, like exploring, like traveling, I get introduced to new places, new ideas, broader horizons.

Consequently, one of my very favorite quotes hails from one of my favorite writers, the aforementioned Mark Twain. Twain writes in his 1869 book Innocents Abroad, detailing his travels through Europe and the East, which I studied once in a graduate English seminar: "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”

Twain’s comment is excruciatingly truthful, and, so, along with seeking out worthwhile quotations, I also plan to take to heart his advice and travel as much as I can. I recommend both to anyone who has a mind and the means.